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Have fun WS! But also remember both my Mom and Grandpa had melanoma and many other kinds of skin cancer for 40 years each and it never killed them. It really is only deadly if not found until stage 4 so odds are that your wife will be fine. They will watch her closely and they say to always check your back because that is the one place you can't see yourself. When my Dad was alive he checked my Mom's back and once he died the doctor had her come in once/year for him to do it. I saw Elton John once and he was fabulous.

Have fun WS! But also remember both my Mom and Grandpa had melanoma and many other kinds of skin cancer for 40 years each and it never killed them. It really is only deadly if not found until stage 4 so odds are that your wife will be fine. They will watch her closely and they say to always check your back because that is the one place you can't see yourself. When my Dad was alive he checked my Mom's back and once he died the doctor had her come in once/year for him to do it. I saw Elton John once and he was fabulous.

Thank you everyone for well wishes. And thank you Terry for those special words of encouragement.

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself : Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

—Hunter S. Thompson, age seventeen

Had my primary career not existed, I would have certainly opted for the shore. In fact, my life could be described as the former sandwiched between a youth of caution and a retirement of anonymity. In my youth I felt overshadowed by my living uncles who every single one had served in WWII and the Korean Conflict., one Army, one Navy and One Air Force. But I felt no inherited calling to defend and serve. I would be more at ease in the company of Ralph Nader and his Public Interest Research Group followed by a concert by the Doobie Brothers than attend a meeting of ROTC and take PT in the college common area.

But as things are want to change , so did my life. At some point I became addicted to the adrenaline of the “storm of life.” No drug could give me the high that driving 120 mph in pursuit of a fleeing felon could. Nothing could tighten the chest like walking into a situation with an armed person threatening suicide or hoping to have you do the favor for him. Could you capture the anticipation of responding to an armed bank robbery or watching someone with a bomb locked to his chest explode taking his life?

It is with these hair raising experiences shaken on the boredom of routine work that a person loses himself and when finally he stops wonders where he might find himself again. Is it in the glowing coals of the fireplace or the bottom of a tumbler? Is it in the hug of a seven year old or hot cup of coffee in the crepuscular predawn?

The answer is not either/or. The answer is both. I have stood out in the open during the storm and had lightning break down around me and light trees on fire. I have lounged comfortably beneath a shady maple as the breeze rustles among the leaves and the sunlight ducks in and out behind the clouds. I have lived and I have merely existed.

I have always valued freedom more than anything else. That’s probably why, as a child and it continues today, I didnt like zoos. I hated seeing majestic animals caged. And even though I have killed for food, I have always felt sorrow immediately after taking that freedom. I always yearned for a life of freedom, and would daydream about living in a cabin in the woods. I was actually on a course to realize that fantasy when I met and married my wife. My life veered off in a different direction but I have always had that cabin in the back of my mind.

Perhaps the right word is dichotomy. There were and still is two different paths in the road. One claims complete freedom from the interests of others, the other requires most often putting others first. This is the sacrifice of sharing a life with a partner and the offspring resulting from that partnership. Friends can always be ignored without much if any consequence.

Work always compromises freedom. Receiving payment for specific actions sells a certain percentage of your freedom as a trade off against poverty. But it isn’t long until you are selling your freedom for a trivial possession or needless Vice. The self sufficiency movement is not a new thing, even though the tiny house people would like to think that. The mobile home was my first exposure to the tiny house movement. Only back then it was necessitated by poverty not instigated by novelty.

I suppose the original tiny house was actually the American Indians teepee. There are plenty of self sufficient youtubers today who wax eloquently while seated on a remote frozen lake fishing for crappie. They bemoan cramped city life and the rush of working for “the man.” While I envy them for a moment, I sometimes wonder why anyone who yearns that much for freedom and solitude, would fracture it all by introducing a camera and editing and internetting into the bliss of self sufficiency. I really wonder.

Theres also a bit of irony in a man like me contemplating the freedom and simplicity I missed out on. After all, I spent much of my life taking people’s freedom from them based on rules, regulations and codes canonized by society. Some of those people deserved it. In retrospect, some didn’t. Not because I went out of my way to trap them but because the rules as they were written necessarily trapped them.

Of all people, growing up I despised rules and considered them mostly as suggestions. Suggestions I often ignored. I didn’t like getting caught but it didn’t deter me from breaking them. In fact, rules simply got in the way of my ability to express my freedom. And so, there were times when the rules got bent, twisted and outright broken.....both as a child and as an adult. Because my morals and ethics were created by a system of religiousity, I expected to be punished by The Almighty for my infractions. Yet, with a fairly large sample observed over this life, I can deduce that breaking rules will not not often be punished let alone always or even sometimes.

And so as a member of a community, I obey rules in order to keep order. But I will admit to enjoying failing to stop (complete cessation of motion as the law demands) at a stop sign, nudging over the speed limit by more than a few miles per hour and hanging a squirrels tail on my rear view mirror. I won’t admit to my other less innocuous violations of law.

I suppose my quest for freedom fueled my yearning to live away from crowded streets and city life. It seems rules are needed more there than in the mountains of Idaho. Those in urban settings are used to restrictions that help things go smoothly. They given up their autonomy on a daily basis quite freely in exchange for the benefits of a communal life. I’m actually kind of glad a lot of people want to live gobsmacked together in on each big lump of humanity. It makes my dream of solitude seem achievable. That’s why I live in one of the least populated counties in my state.

We all make choices that result in consequences. Mine was a union of two people. I gave up my solidarity with freedom for the benefits of companionship. I don’t regret that but it doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to ponder what life would have been....alone.

My dog as a child was often chained to an outside box. I loved going outside on the back porch where he could see me coming. As soon as he saw me, he started pulling at the chain and lifting his front paws up in anticipation of his freedom. I loved releasing the clip on his neck collar. He would run circles until he was exhausted.

I too loved setting those coon dogs free from their chains to play with them. Looking back itís sad - we kept them on a chain the majority of their lives, except during the few months of hunting season.

Thought about your sense of freedom, WS. As a new immigrant I was badly bullied at a small country school as a 10-11 year old girl by three 15-16 year old boys who wanted my to do their bidding. I refused and so got beaten up. I went home for more punishment for getting into a fight. I knew no one to run to for help so went out to the woods and prayed for help. The phrase "to thine own self be true" came to thought like a voice speaking. I felt complete peace and went to school the next day. The three came toward me and I truly felt that no matter what they or anyone did, I would be true to my sense of right. To my amazement, my classmates, aged 12 and under, gathered around me and informed the bullies that they could never touch me again. That was the end of it. We all played baseball thereafter. That developed my sense of imprisonment vs freedom that no one has ever taken away again. I try every thought and action to try to ensure it is right - sometimes I make poor choices but, more often, good ones as I look back at my life so feel I was and am free. Whatever the physical situation, it is not limiting but lack of freedom of thought is true imprisonment.

Gandhi: Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony .

I became aware of Lissa through Youtube. She’s a feisty West Virginian with a bone to pick! Lissa lives in a poor resource rich county in West Virginia. Did you catch that? “Poor” resource rich county. She has a little website called lissalucas.com.

Recently, she travelled to the West Virginia legislature to address a committee taking action on legislation that would benefit the gas and oil industry at the expense of the residents and property of Ritchie County. She was given one minute and forty five seconds. What she did was simply try to list the donors of money to the members of the committee voting on the bill. Of course, this embarrassed the committee members and highlighted the lobbying oligarchy that masquerades as government.

Lissa was unceremoniously cut off and dragged from the hearing room. The chairperson couldn’t even allow her 105 seconds to say her peace. I’ll provide a link to the video of this.

Lissa has a theory. Why is such a resource rich state like West Virginia so damn poor? It’s a question worth asking? Her answer has to do with a concept called the “Economics of Extraction Debt.” There are some unsavory characters involved in this story but in essence, those who live at ground zero....Ritchie County and West Virginia in general are saddled with the weight of covering the costs of externalities involved in extracting the valuable resource.

The companies and politicians that benefit enormously refuse to negate these social,environmental, and infrastructure costs because.....well it would cut into their profits. The politicians who are suppose to represent their constituents instead ply their trade for the big gas and oil companies because after all....that’s where their campaign contributions come from and that’s who invites them to big spreads to put the feed bag on and drink from the whiskey barrel.

The extraction debt as she calls it is actually causing West Virginians to be the habitual butt of jokes across the land even though they are one of the richest resource areas in the land. Education, health, infrastructure, environment, welfare, social ills, addictions, poverty, .......the list is long and West Virginia leads a lot of them.

I have spent a good deal of time in West Virginia. Part of my heart belongs there but I would not live there. Penns Woods is feeling the squeeze also. It turns out we have a rich resource of gas and oil yet to be extracted. I am wondering what our sacrifice might be?

Cool article. I'll watch the video after a phone call I have in a few minutes.

This is exactly how Trump managed to hoodwink the people in these Sacrifice Zones--by promising them economic recovery in their local areas. But with his stripping away regulations at the expense of the people in those areas and favoring corporate interests, what are people in those zones going to really gain? And what will they lose?

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Townwww.silententry.wordpress.com

Just want to add that it might more sense if you know the bill Lissa was commenting on is a “forced pooling” or forced leasing bill that would allow oil and gas frackers to force uncooperative landowners into leasing if they were a part of a unit which the companies had acquired 75% of the landowners signatures.

And also, I am not being an apologist for the Orange One. But I have to point out that had Debbie Wasserman Schultz not fixed the democratic primary for the only candidate that could not beat Donald Trump......things most certainly would be astronomically different in a lot of ways. The hoodwinking part might have been that the jobs were going to be filled by Texans flown in from Houston and not real by God West Virginnys.

Lissa has a theory. Why is such a resource rich state like West Virginia so damn poor? It’s a question worth asking? Her answer has to do with a concept called the “Economics of Extraction Debt.” There are some unsavory characters involved in this story but in essence, those who live at ground zero....Ritchie County and West Virginia in general are saddled with the weight of covering the costs of externalities involved in extracting the valuable resource.

The companies and politicians that benefit enormously refuse to negate these social,environmental, and infrastructure costs because.....well it would cut into their profits. The politicians who are suppose to represent their constituents instead ply their trade for the big gas and oil companies because after all....that’s where their campaign contributions come from and that’s who invites them to big spreads to put the feed bag on and drink from the whiskey barrel.

That concept is exactly why cheese costs more at the co-op -- the extraction debt of milk and production are not borne by the folks at ground zero.

If Americans expended even a fraction of the energy on civic engagement that we spend on consumer ideology, our democracy would be much healthier. Can you imagine people camping out to vote? -- Charles Roberts, Amherst, Mass., Nov. 25, 2006